A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  We talked, as I say, though it would be more correct to say that we told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other's words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other, with signs beyond the physical, with the music of spoken sound, with intelligible words, and at the same time to use words to envelop, to obscure the physical relationship; we soliloquized, we gabbed, we inundated each other with words, and inasmuch as speech has a sensual, physical significance in the words' relationship to one another, in tones and rhythms independent of meaning, we used it to enhance our physical closeness, knowing well that words could only allude to the mind, to what's beyond the body, for words may be genuine but they can never tell the full story; we kept gabbing away—interminably, insatiably, in the hope that with our chaotic stories we would draw each other into the story of our own bodies and share that story with each other the way we shared our bodies, and at the same time we seemed to be using the same stories to defend ourselves, to fight our mutual helplessness and interdependence, aware of that ridiculous past tense in which we each had our own history, when we were independent of each other, when we were free! yet with unerring good sense, we didn't make all that much of these stories, not for lack of attentiveness but because we never wanted to tell each other just something but always everything, everything in every moment—an impossible, laughable undertaking—and as a result we got completely lost in each other's stories; the truth is, I have no idea what we could have talked about at such length, I'd be hard put to cite specific sentences, even if now, recalling our entire episode, I can safely say there's nothing about him I don't know, nothing factual, that is; but every one of our stories suddenly had a hundred more parts and sequels, also waiting to be told, nothing could be followed to the end, though we wanted to reach an end and understand finally why he loved me and why I loved him; needless to say, coming from two seemingly wholly different worlds, our stories were concocted from historical, social, cultural, and psychological fragments, a kind of intellectual dialogue in which often a single word could be clarified only by using another hundred, to say nothing of the fact that only he was speaking his native language, exploiting and delighting in this advantage, creating more and more puzzles and mysteries for me as we went along, so an inordinate amount of time and attention had to be devoted to developing a common language, to clarifying meaning; and still what we said was a little shaky, a little tentative, I could never be sure he understood me correctly, while he was forever amplifying, inferring, interpreting; we spent irritatingly long periods clearing up misunderstandings, defining terms, explaining expressions, idioms, grammatical rules and exceptions, but these seemed only playful exercises for him and a sheer waste of time for me; in fact, they were the natural and, in a certain sense, symbolic obstacles to true understanding, cognition, and mastery that could not, and perhaps need not, be overcome with intelligent discourse; just as in the intricate system of a language we invariably reach a point where any insistence on logic will hinder rather than promote mastery, our verbal showers, torrents, and floods also reached their terminal points—one more phrase beyond that point and our glance strayed; distracted, we felt our pulse in our fingertips or noticed the reflection in the other's eyes of a candle's leaping flame, as if the eyes were illuminated from the inside and turned into an inviting blue space, which through the dark gates of the pupils our gaze could enter; he couldn't stand living here, he said, as if talking of someone else, smiling at his own words, he couldn't stand being here! not that it bothered him at all that everything here was supposed to be corrupt, false, rotten to the core, and that everything he touched was twisted and slippery and unreal, no, he was amused by all that, he knew it all too well; if anything, he considered himself very lucky to have been born in a place where a state of emergency had been in effect for fifty years—this was worth pondering—where for half a century not one honest word had been uttered in public, not one, not even when you were talking with your neighbor, a place where Adolf Hitler had scored a knockout victory! where at least one didn't have to bother with unnecessary illusions, because beyond a certain level, a level "we way surpassed," as he put it, he considered lies quite human, quite normal, and he should be permitted the perverse pleasure of not calling a system that ran on lies and fed on lies "inhuman," of not crying "fascist state," as the rest of the world did, for at least this was up front! it was outrageously up front always to say the opposite of what one might be thinking, to do the opposite of what one would like to do, to build on the simple premise that the urge to lie, to cover up, to be secretive and sly, was at least as strong as the urge to be sincere, open, and aboveboard, to seek the so-called truth, which, by the way, we find equally hard to take; and just as humanism tried to institutionalize common sense and reason, fascism institutionalized unadulterated lies, and that was all right too, because, if one wished to look at it that way, it was just another version of the truth, but who the hell cared, anyway, it was all politics, everything he said was, and he didn't give a shit about any of it, not about their truths or their lies, his own included, not a shit about their theories and sentiments, not to mention his own theories and sentiments, about which he also didn't give a shit—not angrily, just mildly amused; he knew all too much about the inner workings of lying not to respect and love it; he considered it a sacred thing, he really did; it was good to lie, it was necessary and pleasurable; he, for one, lied all the time, he was lying right now, every word a lie, so I shouldn't take anything he said seriously but just as a joke, I shouldn't trust him, rely on him, count on him; he knew, for instance, that for all my tact I detested this room because I thought it was a fake; I shouldn't take offense, but he felt I was bourgeois at heart, of an earlier vintage, and I lied timidly, I wrapped my lies in tissue paper; he liked this room precisely because it was a fake, he had made it this way not because he wanted to, he didn't even know what a room should look like to be called really his, he didn't know and didn't care to know! if he left it empty, as he'd originally planned, it still would have looked fake, so between two fake looks he chose this one; he didn't want his room to look the way a room was supposed to look, just as he himself wasn't what he was supposed to be, so let's be consistent in our lies, let's not put the ugly next to the beautiful, the good next to the bad, lies go better with lies, and so on; and the way I lied didn't escape his notice, either: he was taking a stand now, of course, this was a protest, an act of defiance and aggression, in this sense, he must admit, he couldn't deny his Germanness; I need only think of Nietzsche, if I was familiar with his work, of how relentlessly and precisely he rails against a God that didn't exist—he had to laugh every time he thought of it—and thus he fashions Him from His absence, from the desperate anger he felt over His absence; he longs for Him, but should He exist, he'd promptly destroy Him; yes, Melchior wanted to make a show of the fact that he couldn't live here, yet he did, and though he kept bumping into strange, superfluous objects, he knew how to get around them, he was used to them and even liked their falseness; although he didn't believe for a moment that it might be better elsewhere, he was all set to leave, he was simply tired of this place, and he would try to get away, even if it cost his life, which it might, but he didn't give a damn about his life; not that he wanted to commit suicide, but were he to die, now or tomorrow, he'd find it perfectly appropriate; I should try to imagine a life that in all of twenty-eight years had given him only one moment he would call real or genuine, and he knew exactly what that moment was: it happened when he was recovering from an illness that almost proved fatal, and that he'd already told me about when I asked him about the two long scars on his belly, when he'd told me about his two operations; he was seventeen at the time; he climbed out of bed and for the first time after the operation tried to stand up; he had to concentrate just to stay on his feet and hold on to furniture and watch his balance
, so he didn't really know what he was doing, didn't notice that the first thing he wanted to get to was his violin, the case was lying on a shelf, all dusty; I couldn't possibly imagine, he said, what such a black case can mean to a violinist! he realized what he was doing when he was already holding it in his hands, ready to smash it—not smash it, really, not destroy it completely, just make it unusable, maybe knock it against the sharp edge of the shelf or punch a hole in it, not that he had the strength to do anything like that! all he saw was a blur, a soft, dim blur, but he heard loud noises, it sounded like a power saw screeching as it cut into wood; he was alone in the house, he could have done anything he liked, but couldn't, really, he was so weak, his own physical condition preventing him from doing what he had so much wanted to do; he barely had strength to slip the violin onto the dark green velvet of the case, and then he collapsed, and as everything seemed slowly to be growing dark he passed out; but what he really did then was to smash within himself whatever that violin had meant to him; the violin, he realized, was not meant to keep alive the wonder his otherwise pathetically provincial playing had inspired in his audience, it wasn't meant to sustain the benevolent fiction with which his mother deceived him and he, in turn, deceived himself and everyone else who admired him as a child prodigy, who thought that playing the violin made him different from other children, finer, more special, one of the elect; he was the prima donna of a dead object! no, the violin existed for itself, it wanted to play itself, fusing its own physical possibilities with those of a human being, and whoever had the gift of genius would always hover on that very fine line where the object ceases to be an object and the player ceases to be human, where the ambition to draw sound from an instrument is no longer personal but is focused entirely on the object itself; and he seemed to be talented enough to realize this, that no matter how diligent and attentive he was, he could never make the violin sing, the only thing he could coax out of it was the deceptive ambition to be exceptional, and he never wanted to do that again, he would never again touch the violin; they all pleaded with him, implored him to play, for they didn't understand; neither did he, not completely, but he could never touch it again.

  He had first hung it on the wall back then, in that boy's room of his, because it was beautiful! he didn't want it to be anything else, anything more than a shapely object, let it hang there undisturbed, content, that's why he hung it on the wall here, too, let his violin, at least, remain what it was; though now that he had told me the story, and this was the first time he had ever told anyone, it seemed that what he had so lovingly cherished in his memory might not even be completely true; perhaps he only used it to justify his despair, his cynicism, his frustration, his cowardice, feelings akin to the sudden attack of nerves, the paralysis evoked by an even earlier revelation that he'd also told me about, which happened when he once asked his mother, quite casually, playfully even, whether it was possible that he was not the son of the dead man whose name he carried, since on photographs he had never been able to discover the slightest family resemblance, maybe he was someone else's son, and as his mother she ought to know, he was a big boy now, she could tell him; How did you know? she cried—she happened to be washing dishes and swung around, her face suddenly looking as though it were full of long, wriggling worms; he knew nothing, nothing at all, what should he know? it was as if his own death were staring back at him, his end was literally in sight; and from her cry he understood that, unexpectedly and quite senselessly, the two of them were thrown into a state of mortal danger when, in anticipation of rigor mortis and before any decisive action is possible, limbs and sense organs turn stiff and numb, only the skin quivers a little; he was staring into dead eyes; for the longest time they couldn't escape each other's presence, and until late in the evening they didn't even move from the kitchen sink, because it was there she told him the story of the French prisoner of war who was his real father, a story he'd already told me once; it was after this incident that he got sick, though he didn't think his illness had anything to do with the shock of finding out, or at least that was unlikely; you see, he said, when you don't have a father you make one up; then it turns out you don't even have the made-up one, the only thing you've got is his absence, as with God; and now he knew that this was the reason it had been so important for his mother that he not be like the others—hence the violin!—that he be exceptional, which he wasn't, that he not be German, even if he was; but what he hadn't told me yet—he suddenly thought of it now—was what happened after the hospital: for two months he lay in the ward for the terminally ill where patients kept changing so rapidly that in fact he was the only one who remained terminally ill, no one else was left alive; he enjoyed his rare status while his stomach kept filling up with pus; the doctors saw no reason to perform another operation and just stuck a tube in his stomach to drain the pus, he still had a bump there, I should look at it sometime; they simply didn't know what to do with him; he was a goner, but not the proper kind, because he couldn't even die properly, so after two months they asked his mother, who in the meantime had been going insane and gray with guilt, to take him home; she was wasting away, trembling constantly; she kept dropping things, and her eyes seemed to be asking for mercy, but he, no matter how much he would have liked to, could not forgive her; she hovered over him like a ghost, as though every sip of water she got him to swallow was an acquittal, as if that sin she had committed long ago—I must remember, a German woman with a Frenchman! and though at the time, luckily, she had been spared the punishment for criminal miscegenation, "she did rot in jail for three months with me in her belly"—as if that sin came back to haunt her after all those years, but this, too, was a story for another day; anyway, their family doctor, who visited him twice a week, once on an impulse asked him to open his mouth, let's see those teeth, young man; a couple of weeks after they extracted two of his molars he was fit as a fiddle and he'd never had a problem since, as I could see for myself, so, thanks to those two rotten teeth, maybe we could finally extricate ourselves from the slimy depths of his soul; but all joking aside, he must honestly tell me that he was grateful, yes, profoundly grateful to me, because for the first time he dared say out loud all the things he had learned about himself; to him, I was a little like that dentist who had pulled those tiny Adolf Hitlers from his mouth; I had wrenched something from him, and also solved something for him; while talking to me he began to see things more clearly, things he'd never been aware of before, even if he still couldn't talk about them properly; and since he was by nature incredibly self-centered, he believed this to be the reason I had to enter his life, because all the things he'd told me he could share only with a foreigner; yes, he will go away, that much is certain, he has had enough of being a stranger here, and it's better to leave with a clear head, without reproach and hatred, and perhaps he can thank me for that, because I am also a stranger here.

  I must have said something to the effect that he was exaggerating again, I didn't believe I could be so important to him, that wasn't the way major decisions were made.

  He said he wasn't exaggerating at all; when thanks were due, one must be properly thankful; and his eyes filled with tears.

  Maybe that's when I touched his face and gently reminded him that Pierre was also a foreigner.

  But with him he didn't speak in his native language, he said, Pierre was French, and in a way he was French, too, even if his native tongue was German.

  French, my foot, I said; he was being overly nice, which was flattering, of course, but I wasn't asking for any kind of proof, he must believe me, I simply felt... but what I really felt I could not say out loud.